Anonymous Claims It Stopped Karl Rove From Hacking The Election By Hacking ORCA

From Wonkette:

"Oh cool, Anonymous (we think it is Anonymous?) says Karl Rove was gonna vote fraud all the Machines, and that’s why he was so flabbergasted and refused to believe it when Fox called Ohio for Bamz, but they stopped him from stealing all the Machines by jamming up ORCA, because it was not actually a GOTV system but a “steal the vote” system, but they stopped him, we are pretty sure that is what the following letter, which we guess is from Anonymous probably, says. Seems legit! But here is our question! If Anonymous hacked ORCA and caused it to explode miserably on Election Day, how could Anonymous ever prove that ORCA was actually a vote-thieving program? If they hacked in, couldn’t they have planted code to make it look like Rove was gonna fraud the election? (Not that we believe for a second that Rove wasn’t trying to fraud the election, we are just saying, it seems like “logic.”) "

1. I wouldn't be surprised if they did do this...nt

11. I completely agree.

I watched Karl Rove on election night as Ohio had just been called for Obama. His actions showed a man desperately trying to figure out what had gone wrong, yet equally sure, somehow, that this was all going to work out.

At the time, I was thinking about Anonymous' warning: "We're watching you, Karl."

22. That was my impression too, I kept thinking

210. what does he know that we don't?

First, I'll remain skeptical. Second, I believe that what they did is possible. Sounds like a good book. Like Star Trek, surely there is someone out there that could be pulling together anecdotal info and timelines for a book. I have my answer from earlier, the 3rd state would be Virginia. Close, with a Republican Governor. Besides, the fix/patch, would support the surreal campaigne attitude of we're ahead and "hidden voters". "The last day folks that were outside the polls." There was a book that came out in the mid 80's about a hacker into the fledgling DOD internet system. If they truly pulled off something like this, thank you.

239. Not having any tech knowledge or understanding,

I truly don't know what to think of all this. What I witnessed the night Kerry lost has always given me a sick feeling of apprehension concerning another theft. Rove's total disbelief and certainty that the results couldn't be what they were leads me to wonder if an injustice was thwarted? If so, like you....

262. This is the first I have ever heard of that book but

I am going to look into it, thanks. There is no other book or documentary that I am aware of concerning that election. I remember the punditry telling us the exit polls had been sooooo wrong and knew I was being fed a load of bull. It always struck me as so odd how Kerry conceded so readily, without a fight and wondered if it was because of JE's thing with the bimbo that they had become aware of? At any rate, I am going to look into that book, thanks

Rove quickly apprenticed himself to Lee Atwater, considered the then master of 'dirty tricks' such as 'push polls,' fliers that misdirected opposition voters, etc.

Early in his career, Rove focused primarily on Texas judicial elections. At the time, the Texas Supreme Court was held 9-0 by Democrats - businessmen didn't care because Democrats were largely conservative. Rove created a new issue (tort reform), used it to obtain large business donations, and reversed the court's composition to 0-9, favoring Republicans. Donations went to Rove's group (not the Texas Republican Party), and ads were funded by phony grass roots groups.

The year 1986 found Rove working for Clements' gubernatorial campaign. An electronic sweep found a bug in Rove's office - accusations were directed at Clements' opponent, but many believe Rove himself planted the bug - supported by the fact that it would have been almost useless because it used a very short-lived battery.

After the Supreme Court's 'Citizen's United' ruling that allowed unlimited campaign donations, Rove partnered with former RNC Chairman/Bush II advisor Ed Gillespie to form American Crossroads, a SuperPac for large anonymous donors such as Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers. Gillespie subsequently resigned to become a Romney advisor after it became clear Romney would be the nominee. American Crossroads was already targeted at key Senate and House races, as well as supporting legislation to prevent hyped fears of voter fraud. Donors were further motivated by the chance to replace at least one liberal leaving the Supreme Court during the next four years. Unger casts the current campaign as 'Romney's last takeover' with Rove et al putting up $1+ billion for the opportunity to oversee expenditures approximating $4 trillion/year

279. 2 other books, art.

'Fooled Again', by Mark C. Miller, and 'What Went Wrong In Ohio', the report by Congressman Conyers' minority committee hearings into the Ohio election theft. 'Censored '06' (published in '05) by Sonoma State U.'s Project Censored has some chapters on the theft, too.

363. 'Bush Dyslexicon' is good too, (in general, not on election theft).

Prof. Miller edited an '08 book 'Loser Take All' that has a chapter on '04 elections. There's an article from Michael Collins, a piece from David Griscom, and one by Brad Friedman and Michael Richardson.

For some reason, when people cite the Conyers report, they call it 'Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong In Ohio', but the hard copy Conyer's report on the '04 Ohio election theft is just called 'What Went Wrong In Ohio'. The electronic report Preserving Democracy is floating around on this site's old posts. Missing the hard copy's pages 105 - 116, maybe they were added for the print version after the electronic version came out.

227. joe trippi says

On election night for some reason neither Rove nor I can get into the Ohio Secretary of State’s website to get any county data – or any data for that matter. We both tore into the Florida and Virginia election data the second their polls close.

Chris Wallace off air is begging us to get into the Ohio Secretary of State website but Karl and I get the same error messages we have gotten all night long.

Chris Wallace received an email that he would read on the air from someone high up in the Romney campaign – that email says that Romney will win Florida by 10,000 votes. Virginia is tight and Ohio is moving their way. At that same moment I receive an email report from an Obama contact insisting that Obama will win Florida and with it the Presidency, Virginia is close but they will win it – but (and this is a direct quote) “Ohio is scary”.

Karl and I scrambled to see if we could get into the Ohio Secretary of State’s website again. Karl yelled out that he had gotten in. And just at that moment we hear in our ear Bret Baier declare that the Fox News Decision Desk has called the state of Ohio for Barack Obama.

286. A vote-flipping app by any other name...

333. Isn't it though - shortly before he was to testify

I think this time around it might be the Koch Bros. shopping for a new small plane for Rover.

I totally think the Anonymous scenario explains why Rover had his meltdown about how the Ohio vote needed to be counted. You could just sense his plan had been thwarted this time. Then there was Romney being so sure he had "won".

Bush stole 2000 and 2004, and if you step back and look at the big picture, there's no doubt about it. After the 2000 mess, the Rethugs took it up a notch. Remember the big bucks they gave to each state to install computerized voting throughout the country before 2004? Since then, there have been too many "irregularities" in targeted areas, and the voting results *always* favor Republicans. Personally, I think these machines explain the 2008 Rethug sweep into Congress. Also, targeted blue states ended up with Governors, SOS positions and legislators who would pave the way for an easy steal in 2012.

I was terrified that the puppet masters had hired Rove to pull it off again in 2012, and I am so thankful that the true votes were counted this time. If the Anonymous people stopped the cheating, thank you for saving my country and my sanity!!

309. If this whole thing is true,

and I'm leaning toward believing it is, then Rove hiring 'less-than-competent' programmers wouldn't surprise me a bit. He's got that greedy republican mindset, which as we know, always tends to blind people into being short sighted. Yup, even KKKarl. If there is a weakness in his abilities, my guess is that money would be it, winning out even over his ego driven need to continually be viewed as 'Kingmaker'.

Why, just the other day, Colbert demonstrated how one can legally keep PAC money if done right. He might have been seeing his 'American Crossroads' as another opportunity to pocket some serious cash. Again. I'm sure that he probably has done it before w/little to no problems; accomplishing the goal of solidifying his reputation as 'Kingmaker' -and- feeding his money addiction. A million here, a million there, and eventually we are talking some serious cash.

All supposition of course, but seems to fit, imo.
And if my theory is reality, I'm loving how his cutting corners didn't work... at least not this time. Bwahaha!

271. It was not ORCA that Anonymous tunneled into.

It was SmarTech.
---
Thread: "So SMARTECH, company that hosts gwb43.com (owned by RNC), ALSO hosted the OHIO ELECTION RETURNS???" DemocraticUnderground.com, March 21, 2007.
Thread: "So what exactly have we stumbled onto with the SMARTech Corp nameserver?" DemocraticUnderground.com, March 22, 2007.

20. Me too, nothing like the fear of cyber god to

4. To answer your question, there's a big difference between rigging a machine and breaking it.

If you see that someone has set up a, for instance, vote rigging machine, it would be easier and more sensible to just break it than to try to hijack it. This claim seems quite believable to me, given the behavior of Rove and the GOP/big money establishment in general on election night, but I suppose we'll never know.

5. Karl Rove on election night

On Fox saying he had been in constant communications with Ohio who was constantly refreshing the numbers that jumped from a 900 margin to several thousand and asking Fox not to call Ohio for the president

12. I'd heard the same

about ORCA. But it was only about actual election dat that I heard bits a pieces about how it fell apart. I guess it could make sense if the breakdown occurred only on election day and because of it interfered with what it was structured to do that day. I heard there were supposed to be troops on the ground obstructing and doing "other things" but instructions never went out as expected. It sounds believable to me - and it sure would explain the delusion that mitt and friends appeared to be living under.

283. "Had you heard about Obama's get-out-the-vote program before election day? Pretty much no one had."

yeah- i "heard about it"- as a matter of fact, i was PART OF IT. I "heard about it" back in 2008 when i signed up to help "get out the vote". There were THOUSANDS of us back then and "Obama's get-out-the-vote program" built an that successful base in 2012 to win both the popular vote and electoral college. That ain't "pretty much no one".

To steal a catch phrase from Romney: &quotGet out the vote programs) are PEOPLE, my friend"- LOTS of people- and we ALL "heard about it".

332. Rove was upset because he took hundreds of millions of dollars from billionaires

and had nothing to show for it.

I just don't see him being nearly as clever as others here see him to be. I don't view him as this nefarious mastermind. I think he's just a washed up hack, whose political skills and craft are no longer relevant...

As you said, it's over. I'm enjoying the schadenfreude.

BTW, TD Garden is named after the sponsor TD Bank, a subsidiary of Toronto Dominion. I agree that their problems at the TD area weren't the cause of his loss - but it's indicative of the incompetence and arrogance of the Romney campaign in believing everything would go smoothly at the TD Garden arena. They had numerous wifi and tech issues, none of which were tested for. It's actually pretty funny seeing how many things could go wrong.

348. I agree that

Rove isn't that smart....he's just a big bully and knows how to HATE, STEAL, and probably KILL. But he had some extremely smart IT folks working for him in '04. Michael Connell was quite the guru. He's of course dead....another small plane....right before his deposition regarding the OH '04 Election.

Ask people in OH who were watching the returns. Kerry is ahead. Exit polls showed him leading by 4.2%. All of a sudden the SoS's screen goes blank at 11:12 pm. When it comes back up, W is leading by a mile. Everyone knew 'something' had happened. We were naive back then. Not now.

Plus, in the meantime, it has been proven that these machines can be hacked from the outside fairly easily. These machines are a waste of taxpayers money....all going to Corporations. Paper and pencil is the best way and with little expense. No maintenance, no storage, no testing, no failures, no glitches.

87. Are you sure hacking had nothing

to do with it? I'm only asking because I suspected there would be tampering on election day. Especially with the new software on Ohio machines. Triggering voting machine changes may have required something planned through ORCA. I don't know. It was romney's shock, his campaign's behavior, Rove's meltdown, in light of what the rest of the world knew, that has me overly suspicious. I mean, how would a person of even average intelligence not know they didn't stand a real chance?

I don't know but I just can't believe they actually thought they would win

213. Jeff that is why hacking is so successful... It doesn't leave any evidence behind... This is why

not allowing source code to be monitored needs to be changed. Clinton Curtis explained how this is done without any trace when he testified in front to the congressional Black Caucus... Years ago.... and Mike Connell who was to testified had a plane accident and died...

"At the outset of this hearing, I would like to announce that 10 members of Congress, including myself, have written to (Ohio) Gov. Taft asking him to either delay or treat as provisional the vote of Ohio�s presidential electors,� Rep. John Conyers, the senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee said at the outset. �The closer we get to Columbus and the Ohio presidential election, the worse it looks. Each and every day it becomes increasingly clear that the Republican power structure in this state is acting as if it has something to hide.�

Ironically, Democratic State Senator Ray Miller of Columbus had secured the North Hearing Room in the statehouse. But Republicans cancelled that, and forced the gathering to convene at city hall, a block away.

Packed to overflowing, the nearly four hour hearing hosted new disclosures about election irregularities and fraud on Nov. 2, while also pursuing remedies to account for the vote and delay the Electoral College certification of the president.

Prime target in the hearings was GOP Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, who supervised the state's elections while also serving as co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign. Calls for Blackwell's removal were constantly repeated."

16. They put a proxy server in that intercepts data coming from polling places and

modifies the data to the tabulating location.
Lets say Romney is going to win by 5 percent, they divide the total by 2.
Give 1.05 to Romney and .95 to Obama..

This works as long as the total is not known. It can not be done once the totals are know.

I think what happened is, that was done. But totals were announced but there were thousands of people in line that totally skewed the results. You can not change the totals once they are put on the air.
You can not start subtracting from 1 persons total and give it to another.

46. Jeff47 you are naiive! Example: There were voting totals being sent wirelessly to

the Ohio Secretary of State's office. One of the biggest complaints from computer experts and others, was that others could EASILY intercept and change the numbers before they reached the Secy of State. There were also voting via email provisions for the military, and oversees citizens. Easily screwed with.

NOBODY can say with certainty that the system was not connected to the Internet, unless you designed and installed the computer system.

360. vote totals are staged at the county level...something collects that...

Kathleen Nickolaus in Waukesha COunty, WI was found to of used Excel and Access to tabulate totals...she certified the totals and send the results probably via SFTP to a state staging area....

if software was purchased by a state and mandated for all counties to use (As in the case for Ohio) then the infrastructure is in place to tamper with totals...if electronic machines are used then the original totals from each machine could be tampered to backup the fudged totals later...the voting machines themselves DO NOT NEED TO BE ON A NETWORK...(but they probably have a private wireless network for collection of totals at the polling station then these totals are send to the central county staging area)

There is a data file of totals for each machine for each polling station, for each county....with redundant copies of each...there has to be...data does not exist as a IP packet...it exists as a file on a harddrive...

State IT will assume a secure VPN socket or WAN connection is secure...most counties will not have centralized WAN connectivity to state offices so vote totals go through the internet via virtual private network connection or secure shell (ssh, sftp)

If centralized software is used to the illusion of secure tabulation and transmission if hooks were put in place to allow tampering of totals early in the transmission chain it would be easily accomplished. As would adding a firewall to prevent such tampering...that is what hackers do...they build little versions of the same technology used everyday and disguise it to prevent detection...they can put mini firewalls, mini mail servers a host of things....all that needed to be done once they identified what port to block was to block that port and prevent Rove from tampering with a handful of county totals in Ohio.

30. That makes no sense

ORCA was a system operated by the GOP to organize GOTV. That has nothing to do with vote counting. All the complaints about ORCA had to do with how useless it was on election day in helping the GOP get out the vote. I didn't hear any reports that ORCA was actually paralyzed, just that it didn't effectively do the job it was designed for.

If ORCA were hooked into the vote counting systems operated by the states, this implies a whole other level of corruption. And this is simply not how one would go about corrupting vote counts. The easier way to do that would be to install rogue software at the last minute, bypassing Ohio's testing requirements -- which is in fact with Husted did. That doesn't require taking over any servers or breaking into any networks.

74. Knowing the track record for the GOP's lies and penchant for malicious mischief against political

foes, AND knowing kkkarl rove's track record for sneaky-ass duplicitous schemes, I would actually bet on that ORCA program being everything Anonymous says it was. The GOP CANNOT be trusted. And it wouldn't surprise me at all if they put something together to try to make SURE the fix was in. I'm just looking at past track records, that's all. As that old cliche says, the past is prologue. This would have been a scam to make lee atwater proud enough to try to rise from the dead. And that it might have been cooked up by his most loyal and attentive disciple - well, what I've seen and observed over numerous election cycles, and the way the GOP tends to maintain a default position of attempting to rig the game, either overtly or covertly, tells me this is plausible.

I wouldn't be ONE BIT surprised, considering the people involved here.

120. I believe they tried (or intended) to rig it -- just not this way

It doesn't make any sense that ORCA would be involved. There are certainly other ways they could have rigged matters, and I certainly believe Rove would do that. Indeed, I believe he was genuinely surprised when the results came out as they did.

I believe that Husted was central to that operation and he got cold feet:

a) because of the intense scrutiny that would put on him; and

b) when he saw that committing a felony for Rove wasn't actually going to win the election anyway.

But this missive from "anonymous" is bogus.

The real Anonymous might have been involved. If so, then they should have collected some solid evidence of the attempted vote-rigging, and I expect that to come out soon. If we don't see that, then it is probably just morans farting around.

158. A typo (now corrected)

173. ORCA was a voter tracking system.

It would track voters against a listserve of rep registrations for GOTV, but at the end of the day, you have a listserve of voters v. registrations v. dem registrations. This gives you the amount of vacant votes on the rep side that can be entered into a compromised system.

ORCA wouldn't need to be the app that steals the election, it's just the intel app. Then they can use the Ohio '04 "Man in the Middle" hack, or the IR interface.

195. Anon Note says:

They might just send all their info to a guy who is sitting in London just itching for something to do. And that guy is some whiz-kid who knows how to disburse electronic communications. Now who could that be?

42. IOW, how do you do your absolutely vital GOTV - AND - not know actual counts as close as possible.

157. ORCA was not based on counts...

at least not from what I've read. Poll watchers are allowed to look at the voters log in sheets, and ORCA was suppose to allow those poll watchers to connect with a staff in Boston who would then GOTV of registered republicans who had not yet voted.

242. ANON never said it was ORCA, read his post closely

295. I was replying

to the question about 'Vote count" not to the original OP. ORCA was about voter identification, not voter count.

I never replied to the original post because I consider myself lucky to be able to turn on my computer. I am totally tech ignorant so talk of firewalls, back doors, coding etc. flies right over my head.

The letter, btw is signed "ORCA Killer"

While I would like to believe that ANON, or some other group, foiled Rove's attempts at theft , the letter seems a bit self-serving. Rather than hearing more clueless comments from Romney talking to his donors, I would love to hear the private discussions going on between Rove and his donors. Or the Kochs and their minions....Then we might know whether this was a major Rove fail.

48. That's my understanding as well.

The vote thieving was a completely different system. ORCA failed because it was stupidly designed and not tested. The vote fraud failed because Obama's team was on the ball and federal judges were breathing down Husted's neck.

159. exactly. There is no connection between gotv (ORCA) and vote counting.

307. I am not saying I believe this, but:

Most vote fraud revolves around the fact that lots of people don't vote. So, if 40% of the people don't vote, and you know who they are, then you can "vote" a portion of those votes.

That is the way it worked in the old big city machines. At 3pm you find out who hasn't voted yet. Ideally you get those people out to the polls, but if they won't come then you go in and pretend to be them.

Now, with computerized voting, there is no need to do all that hard work, theoretically.

However, people are watching. So why not do the following: have ORCA immediately stream back who hasn't voted yet. Then, of those people, you know which ones are unreachable by any checking up... maybe you have already called the number in their voter file and you know it's disconnected.. so of those people who didn't vote and are unreachable, you go and vote them.

38. DOS attack. Not DNS attack.

A denial of service attack is when you do something to overload a server so that it can't respond to legitimate requests. One such attack is to use an army of hacked machines to just send data to the target server. The server spends so much time dealing with the flood of junk it can't handle requests from real users.

Comcast thought they were under a DoS attack because they never load-tested the application, and never told Comcast to expect massive traffic that day.

DNS is the domain name service. It's what translates convenient names like "democraticunderground.com" to their real address (216.158.28.196)

364. Depends on the size of their upstream pipe.

The basic cable modem service from Time Warner in these parts has more bandwidth than a T-1. So I would only need my connection to overload a server on the other side of that T-1.....at least until their ISP blocked me.

10. Its possible, but GOP incompetence is more likely.

Anonymous wouldn't be the first group to falsely claim credit for something, to get publicity and headlines. I haven't seen any evidence they were behind the GOP fiasco, so I'm inclined to believe it was bad planning and incompetent execution.

75. That's just it.

They wanted you to think it was anything but a vote tampering operation, otherwise, why did Rove behave so strangely on Faux? Rove had Husted on the line while all this was going down. Turd Blossom freaked when he found out it wasn't working.

34. Now THAT is eminently plausible.

176. My thoughts exactly!

It was clear from his behavior that Rove was up to something but I think it had to do with Husted and he chickened out. Adding Anonymous to this turns it into "must see TV!" Most of the best Anonymi are rotting in jail right now. Anonymous isn't nearly as good as they were when they had master hackers. Then again, how would I know if all of their hackers are in jail?

270. I'm HAPPY. they Lost, we Won, that's the most important. I'm going with Anonymous.

310. I choose to believe it. Yes I understand that it's partially because I "want to believe".

Those that dont believe, also do so because they "want not to believe". They dont believe that where there is smoke, there is fire. I dont have a problem as long as they dont use ridicule to try to change my mind.

IMO it is well documented that the presidential elections were stolen in 2000 and 2004. Many still refuse to believe it because it would shake their view of reality. They argue that the DoJ hasnt done anything therefore there isnt any evidence. The poor logic is used to protect their view of reality. IMO the DoJ hasnt done anything for the same reason Al Gore conceded in 2000. He was afraid that a serious challenge to the electoral system might tear the country apart.

Here is how I see it. Karl Rove is a "fixer". He has a documented history of influencing elections. Give him a blank check and I guarantee he will try to "fix" an election or three. That's what he does. In the last couple of years with all the distractions of all the nitwits running for the repub nomination, I kept saying "keep your eyes on Karl". He is up to something. I also believe that the oligarch overlords didnt worry about nominating a total train wreck because the fix was in.

As far as Anon, I believe it wouldnt be hard to monitor Rove's minions and interfere with their attempts to flip votes. I also believe that something went very wrong on election night. Karl's behavior indicated such.

361. State/County IT Infrastructure is not anything like the Pentagon's or Langley

WHy would a county need to be as secure? WHo would pay for that?

State and County IT infrastructure is like any other...full of holes...I totally find this article plausible....not the ORCA thing but the prevention of tampering at county offices or state offices by a centralized monolithic software system bought as part of a electronic voting package...THAT OHIO BOUGHT....holy shit this is not fucking rocket science...

Ohio put in place a system that had holes built in to allow votes totals to be tampered with as they were TOTALED at the source...

There is no marked ballot to count...

Anonymous would of hacked in a got copies of the source code or access to the county office machines, databases and software...then they could easily find out how the hack worked and engineer a hack to prevent it...and I think they did.

I am 20 IT pro...and it makes sense how they blocked Ohio from being tampered with...based on how Ohio does its voting with touchscreen machines and software tabulation and transmission software.

101. Look at how arrogant and over confident...

...certain groups were on the Romney side. Donors gave tens of millions. These were some of the most rich, powerful and successful people on the planet. They made those bets because they were given assurances--and even certainties--by Rove.

Rove convinced them that a Romney win was in the bag. Rove circled the polling and pundit wagons as well. Fox News personalities spun their forecasts of a Romney landslide. Who puts their reputation and credibility on the line like that??? People who rig the outcome or have been given assurances of the outcome. That's who. Why do you think Dick Morris, Rove, Hannity, Barone and others confidently predicted landslides when all non-partisan data showed the exact opposite. These are wealthy, Ivy-Leaguers; not idiots. All they had to do was jump onto Nate Silver's site and analyze the data. Rasmussen, Gallup and Gravis joined in the charade to give mathematical "evidence" would validate their rigged win.

It wasn't just Rove's behavior that was suspect. The entire Romney campaign reeked of odd, bizarre behavior.

Look at Romney himself. He didn't even write a concession speech. Really? How the frick is your own campaign oblivious to the fact that you will lose in a landslide, when your constant, daily polling data should show you that very outcome? The Obama team knew the numbers were on their side. They called Romney's bluff. Romney kept insisting realities that were fantastical--PA win, OH win, WI, MI wins.

I can see being confident in a close race. However, this was not close. Read Game Change, and listen to Steve Schmidt discuss how his team knew that they would lose--even a month before the election. And we're supposed to believe that Romney didn't anticipate his loss in a campaign where Obama won 330 electoral votes? Really now.

I think the whole Romney campaign was kabuki theater, up until his concession speech. Not everyone knew or was in on the electronic vote rigging, but key Romney players and pundits were fed Romney electoral landslide fantasies by those who were rigging it.

154. I believe you are right.

They tried to steal the election again on us.
This is the only reason he was shocked.
Think about it even the best sports teams when the lose a competition are never shocked. They are disappointed but never shocked. This man went to the top schools he is a mater crook, they the GOP had no platform, the media played it like it was neck and neck to prepare us for the final blow. This is why the were so gangster with what they wanted to do, they just knew they were going to win.
That's why the were shocked.

169. I am reminded of 2004

when the exit polls were saying John Kerry had it in the bag and they interviewed W and he just smirked and said something about it not being over yet and I thought, at the time, that he knew something we didn't...

171. That's what I don't get

31. This story is utter crap.

And it's pretty clear the person making it up knows nothing about networking.

First, the voting machines aren't plugged into the Internet. ORCA can't touch them. Neither can these white hats. Nor can anyone involved mess with proxy servers because said proxy servers do not exist.

Second, ORCA was not located in "strategically placed...three different states". One of the major flaws or ORCA was that it was hosted on a single server in Boston that was utterly overloaded on election day. That one server was on the Internet, and could be connected to from anywhere, not "three tunnels".

Third, any geeks who actually did this would describe in explicit detail the network and server configuration. This letter tries to paper over that massive failure with flowery language, but lacks the technical details an actual geek would use.

135. Jeez did anybody actually read the letter before commenting?

or just skim through it?

First, they talk of two actions, ORCA Killer and The Great Oz. You are claiming that ORCA killer could not do what they claim they did with The Great OZ. This is an obvious misunderstanding of the text of the announcement on your part.

Second, see first point.

Third, is this the first Anonymous announcement you've ever read? They always do that cheesy stuff.

174. Go read it again. You are completely wrong.

Fundamentally, this letter is claiming OH voting machines are connected to the Internet. They are not. They can give whatever fancy name to the stuff they are making up, but it doesn't change this.

Again, this letter is written by someone who kinda understands computers, but doesn't really understand. Think about whatever area of life where you happen to be an expert. Think about how a poser sounds when they try to pretend they are an expert. This letter is that. They've got some keywords, they managed to put them in a not-completely-ridiculous places, but they demonstrate there's no actual understanding.

220. They don't have to be directly connected to the Internet

There are things called bridges, and proxy servers that help to keep smaller networks on a large network "separate" to the people using the smaller network.

The beauty is that they don't have to say in all technicality how it was done. Those of us with the technical knowledge can figure it out. Those who cannot figure it out will not understand, so why not just use sort of abstract poetic language? Why would they want to expose themselves as an "expert?" Do you think that they want a target on their back? To me it's more than clear how it's done, and most wouldn't understand it, no matter how many diagrams or words I used. So why bother? Why not practice your poetry and obfuscation instead?

358. Sorry, my bad, the tabulator, not the actual voting machine

Is connected to a network. Therefore the counts are available for modification.
The tabulators are the machines that they dump the memory cards from the voting machines into, to get the results. There are more than one of them, and there is one master. Otherwise they would not be able to get the counts out to the press/public quickly.

281. How did they transmit vote totals to Ohio SoS?

Since the uncertified patch installed by Husted was for electronic reporting vote totals to the SoS election site, that would certainly indicate some type of network / communications capability. I haven't looked at the current crop of voting and tabulating systems in Ohio, but in past cycles they had network connectivity, even blamed one "bug" on anti-virus software!

You are really naive about the technical aspects of these various systems over the years. The more you know about security threats, the less confident you are that anything electronic is secure. I have well over 40 years experience as an expert at the highest levels in computer and network security and with few exceptions (Multics, OpenVMS, and similar) nothing is secure, nothing is protected. Since we now have almost no secure chip foundries, we really can't trust the hardware either.

Most network security, encryption, and authentication is derived from Israeli and American technology, mostly that from RSA Security and its spinoff Verisign - public key encryption, SSL, HTTPS, digital signing, Certificates of Authority, site authentication, ... Most of these technologies and companies are now owned by EMC Corp, as are Network Solutions, Symantec / Norton, and lots of others. (BTW there is an interesting cozy relationship between EMC and Bain regarding these companies.)

This entire web of electronic trust and certification is itself not to be trusted. The RSA server infrastructure was hacked a couple of years ago with far reaching compromises to network security. While nothing should be trusted now, the most obvious problems have been with digitally signing malware and sites with fake CAs for Google, Microsoft, and just last month for Adobe. Throw in some DNS poisoning and everything falls apart. They also created fake CAs for Mossad, CIA, and MI6.

There are a lot of people with the ability and the tools to hack into nearly any system. That includes some with Anonymous. In the last 24 hours, Anonymous has been taking down Israeli sites in response to Israeli threats to net access in Gaza.

I don't know about voting in Ohio in 2012, though I know a lot about 2004-2010 in Ohio and particularly in NC. We got the laws changed in NC.

In 2012 I have focused on how the telephone polls might have been rigged. It turns out that many of the major polls can be rigged from a single company, a company with strong ties to Romney and Bain. I posted about this before the election, but it was unnoticed in the face of Sandy and the election itself.

327. Memory card.

Since the uncertified patch

Patch was for tabulators, not voting machines. Votes got to the relatively few tabulators by a memory card.

even blamed one "bug" on anti-virus software!

This may surprise you, but one can actually install anti-virus software without an Internet connection.
Many places will put anti-virus on disconnected network enclaves to protect those systems - someone could still bring a virus into the disconnected network. Such as the network running our drones in Nevada. (The malware in that case is basically harmless, since it can't transmit the recorded keystrokes since it's not on the Internet. But it got in)

I have well over 40 years experience as an expert at the highest levels in computer and network security and with few exceptions

Most network security, encryption, and authentication is derived from Israeli and American technology, mostly that from RSA Security and its spinoff Verisign - public key encryption, SSL, HTTPS, digital signing, Certificates of Authority, site authentication

And this makes me doubt your credentials even more. All you've described security of web browsers. Not computers or networks.

308. The claim by Anonymous does however seem to jive with the reactions of Rove

as Fox called the race for Obama. You, as I, have zero clue to what actually happened, but at least I can see the plausibility of the claim by Anon by the reactions of the parties involved. You offer nothing other than "It's complete and total bullshit"...but based on what evidence? Clearly you despise Anonymous, for what reason I can only guess, but I will say that the events of that evening with respect to Rove DO lend credibility to this claim by Anon.

40. They could also use someone that understands networks so they don't sound so dumb. (nt)

338. Plus somebody who understands what a web app is vs. what tabulators and voting machines are

Even if there was some internet connection somewhere that the voting machines were connected to (which there wasn't), ORCA was a web app based in Boston for looking up voter names in a database so activists could be sent names of voters who had not yet voted. It was a simple web front end connected to a simple database back end with no connection whatsoever to voting machines, vote tabulators, or even internet polls.

The fact that the ORCA app was never stress tested proves that is was an amateurish attempt to duplicate the Obama technological advances with zero success.

That anybody is moronic enough to buy into the claims of the video shows how dumb our society really is.

44. I don't want to say "I told you so", but I told you so

Did Anon UN-hack The Vote?This would explain all the last minute GOP back-tracking,
with Rove going on FOX with hair ablaze saying "THIS
CAN NOT BE RIGHT...???" .. outing himself in the process.

My pet theory of the day is that Anon quietly shined some
rays of light deep into the opaque murky e-voting circuitry,
behind the scenes, where only the world's best hackers go ..
and simply made sure that the vote-counting was accurate
and true.

58. Its a romantic idea

I WANT TO BELIEVE!

And it sure fits with Rove's maniacal behaviour on election night.

One big backlash though. IF indeed this was done, and IF Rove and company could find some kind of evidence of tampering by Anon (on their tampering) could it not be used as a reason to demand that Ohio re-vote? Obama wouldn't need the electoral votes anyhow but it might make the GOP demand a whole do-over in the swing states. Then they ramp up the "Democrats are cheaters" talking points everywhere to inflame their base, and Independents........Iye Yie Yie.

347. Very unlikely

Not that the GOP isn't capable of that kind of stupidity, but it
would be dumb for them to point out how they tried their
damnedest to steal the election "fair and square" until that
pesky Anon went and corrected their buggery to reflect the
actual votes.

Also, it would likely end in COMPLETE elimination of e-voting
altogether, as a patently failed system of voting due to it's
inherent susceptibility to being hacked, which would be
awesome for Democrats, and something they do NOT want.

345. Yikes! You are correct. Corrected on edit. Thanks. ~nt

294. +1

Seems to be very likely. I find it curious and funny the great number of DU posters on this thread who just immediately declare "Bullshit", "They're Lying", "Never Happened", etc. without offering a smidgen of evidence to back their accusations. I for one do not know for sure, BUT I do find your explanation of the evenings events to be the most logical and therefore the most likely.

It may be complete bullshit... but the reason posters here keep giving for calling it bullshit is not valid and stems from a misreading of the document.

I understand why people would misread the document. It is horribly written. But the vehemency of the protests look kind of silly when almost everyone vigorously protesting is using absolutely invalid reasoning.

223. now THAT is bovine fecal matter

47. ORCA had NOTHING TO DO WITH VOTING MACHINES...

It was a data collection tool for poll watchers to facilitate voter monitoring, and Karl Rove, who didn't work for the Romney campaign, had nothing to do with it. But if it makes a bunch of nerds in Guy Fawkes cartoon masks feel important...

68. It had everything to do with calling the election.

They created a fancy computer system that could be used to contradict results in battleground states-- casting doubt on results that favored Democrats. I.E. its a propaganda tool and someone intentionally or unintentionally caused it to appear broken.

106. ORCA wouldn't give you "propaganda" any more than making numbers up would...

All it did was give them turnout records for "their" voters; it wasn't intended to track "our" voters, and simply announcing great turnout numbers (real or fake) wouldn't require you prove it with database records. In any case, nothing here has to do with preventing voting machine hacks, per the OP.

84. How do you know what it was? You only know what they say it was.

If it is not, imagine how they, who have had no qualms about stealing elections, must feel if this one time they are innocent? Will they respond and try to prove their innocence? They should if it's not true.

If they don't, well, maybe they don't want to have to prove anything and would rather just let it die.

Either way they are now in the position of either defending their 'honor' or having thousands of people believe they tried once again to steal yet another election.

I think if anything, Anonymous is playing with their heads. And Rove gave them perfect ammunition by his strange behavior on the night of the election.

That they are using it to create even more suspicion of election thieves is fine by me.

86. You rang?

Actually, we're pretty much teh only website whose official editorial policy is that the GOP stole Ohio in 2004. We are EXTREMELY concerned about the voting machines. And on this particular story, we're agnostic.

60. Anonymous didn't say they stopped the theft through ORCA. Only that

they could access Orca, among other things.

I don't know if they did this or not...and I don't know if Anonymous has ever before claimed they did something they didn't, but it's interesting to suppose that if outside groups can hack voting machines and tabulators to steal an election, it should be easy to hack the hack and prevent it from happening and that there would be groups out there interested in doing it.

(I wonder if there are foreign nations or corporations trying to figure out how to be 'involved' in our elections this way? Wouldn't it be cheaper than lobbying and donating?)

121. Wait...do you really believe that a status quo that FORCES us to use electronic voting

machines, voting systems that make it completely impossible to ensure accurate vote counts, are going to do anything to Karl Rove?

No fucking way. They'd murder the whistle blower that came forward, maybe after torturing information out of her/him, burn her/his body to a crisp, and dump the ashes in the sewer.

Sorry, what you are asking for here is for some patriotic, anonymous hero(es) to commit suicide.

There is a reason that the 1% status quoFORCES us to use electronic voting machines that are completely counter to a genuine democratic process. There is a reason that legislators refuse to even discuss the issue, despite widespread public concern.

I imagine that you can quickly deduce what these reasons are.

And maybe there is a way that the 99% can prevent them from FORCING these machines upon us.

That way definitely does not include suicide by reporting covert corrections of voting systems that had been previously altered for malicious non-democratic purposes.

152. You have it right here.

"Vote totals have been sent through servers to election officials before tabulation."

This is the key, because Rove did this in 2004 !!

"There is more than ample documentation to show that on Election Night 2004, Ohio's "official" Secretary of State website – which gave the world the presidential election results – was redirected from an Ohio government server to a group of servers that contain scores of Republican web sites,including the secret White House e-mail accounts that have emerged in the scandal surrounding Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s firing of eight federal prosecutors. "

"Recent revelations have documented that the Republican National Committee (RNC) ran a secret White House e-mail system for Karl Rove and dozens of White House staffers. This high-tech system used to count and report the 2004 presidential vote– from server-hosting contracts, to software-writing services, to remote-access capability, to the actual server usage logs themselves – must be added to the growing congressional investigations."

Why wouldn't they try this again? Rove probably had more to gain financially this time. So if Rove was capable of redirecting the election results from an Ohio government server to a Republican server in Tennessee in 2004, why wouldn't someone like "Anonymous" be able to stop him in 2012?

73. This makes no sense.

Why would a GOTV system be used to hack voting machines? What would be the purpose of linking together two systems with totally different purposes?

But what really shows this to be nonsense is the claim that Rove was going to hack all the machines.

Were they planning to rig the vote on some tabulators in Ohio, but then decided against it when it became obvious that Obama was going to win even without Ohio? Maybe. Possibly.

Were they planning to somehow rig every voting machine in the country? No. It would be next to impossible and way to risky.

Regarding ORCA: was it a clusterfuck because of Anonymous? No. It was poorly designed, poorly written, poorly tested, and the rollout was incompetent. They assumed that every volunteer had a working printer and could print out a 60 page PDF the night before the election. They used a secure website (good idea), but when people typed in http or just www.something.org it simply gave them a 404 rather than redirecting them to the secure https address.

They didn't tell the GOTV volunteers (the people who would be using ORCA) that they needed to go to a Romney headquarters and pick up an ID before they'd be allowed to enter the polling place.

It was a truckload of these kinds of design, training, and rollout errors that did in ORCA, and none of that was caused by Anonymous.

115. I envy your pride in knowing that you can unequivocally determine what is and isnt bullshit.

I dont know what happened but I strongly believe that the elections in 2000 and 2004 were tampered with. And I also believe that there was an attempt again this year. Call me stupid all you want if it makes you feel better.

83. Hmmm...

I was wondering whether there were to be any anti-vote rigging in those states that were vulnerable, could it have been that there were folks associated with this group who had physical access to the, the... operating systems or even the "patch" that was placed at the last minute in OH? I mean, it doesn't mean everything they do is by remote access. So if there was no Internet connection, could it be infiltrators who truncated the violations in person? I mean, nobody on the outside of the org knows who the members are... so, many could have been workers in the system of the states, or maintenance people, or even just early voters...?

I'm not saying that what I ponder here is valid but it's a little outside the box of what the OP implies and doesn't allow for the possibilities I mentioned. A few dry leaves to add to the smolder, I guess.

85. I thought of Anonymous too....

88. If this is true, the letter is genius

The FBI will have to investigate if Anonymous was able to hack into anything related to the election, and if they did, then how, and whether they changed the election results. Which means that if Rove was trying something, it will be found.

Honestly, my bet is that this is a hoax letter and that they did nothing, but in the chance I'm wrong, it was well handled.

90. This is going to sound picky

But every time I read something from some person or entity that claims they are wonderful computer coders -- but don't seem to care enough to thoroughly proofread what they write in the English language -- I begin to have severe doubts about the skill they claim to have in coding/hacking/whatever.

I would LOVE to believe that "our side" is winning via stealth methods. I would love it even more if the DOJ would come down like Thor's Hammer on the evildoers Rove represents. But from what I have seen so far I'd rather read a good fiction spy novel than anything by Anonymous.

234. Many programmers make excellent technical writers

The main reason, IMO, for poor software documentation is that it isn't given priority by the people paying the programmers. They want it all done yesterday, and if the doc has to be thrown together, so be it.

edited to add: to the point of your post, though, there's no reason to think this announcement was bogus just because of poor spelling, grammar, or clarity, coders (sadly I am one) have as much variability as the rest of the population. And how do we know someone making an announcement for Anonymous is actually a coder? Could just be a friend or a spokesman, there's no telling from the little we know.

282. We don't know

who made the announcement.
I also find it rather curious to find that people expect Anonymous to expose their or Rove's code. To do so would paint a big target on their back. Don't they realize this?

Yes I agree that coders are as variable as the population. Though I am a lowly technician, a network engineer by trade, I can read code, and troubleshoot it, but I cannot create my own. That takes a level of certain creativity that I do not possess. However, I can design, implement, build, document, and troubleshoot a network. Oh, and I am also a hardware technician. My background in electronics goes back to the tube age. I cut my eye teeth on tubes. (and no, it wasn't painful)

342. Anyone can code

I'm sure you could learn to program if you put your mind to it, considering those other things you've learned. Not sure why you'd want to, though, coding is tedious work, though there is/can be a creative aspect to it.

I've been around a long time too, started programming on mainframe computers before PC's even existed.

I love tubes, use them in my guitar amplifiers. Any simple advice on how to get up to speed on electronics to the point that I can do simple diagnostics and repairs on my tube guitar amplifiers? Pretty off-topic here, but you sound like you might be the right person to ask. Take it to my mailbox if you want.

Back to the OP and thread, I think people are putting all of these expectations on Anonymous and using seemingly arbitrary criteria for evaluation of this communication's authenticity mostly due to their own predisposition to dismiss anything that sounds conspiratorial, such as hackers in the background protecting us from electoral fraud. They seem to need to believe that their own hard work, and that of other Democrats, was all that was needed to win in 2012. I understand that sentiment, but that doesn't make it true. We should keep open minds and try to get to the bottom of this, future elections may depend on it.

126. So what? What an odd rational...

Look at the responses in this thread. Rational people tend to treat vote fixing theories as crazy conspiracies that are too audacious to believe. Why would elected officials be any different, especially when any opinion to the contrary would open them up to public ridicule. I'd say they would be less likely to complain than your average citizen.

I've always wondered about the 2004 Ohio vote fixing because I am an IT professional and normally when something like that comes out, the technical explanations don't make sense and sound like they are written by people who do not understand technology. After reading about the Ohio case, my impression was "Well, that's certainly plausible." A plausible technical explanation doesn't mean it happened, but it doesn't rule it out either. This is why I would like to see someone like Silver weigh in on the situation from a statistical perspective.

To answer your question, of course I would believe him. I've been following Nate Silver's blog for a while now and I believe in math.

153. House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff investigated

..and published a report.

Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio.

//

Given the lack of cooperation we have received from the Secretary of State’s office, it is
difficult for us to ascertain whether the glitches were the result of mistake, negligence, or
intentional misconduct. Depending on the type of misconduct involved, these errors may
constitute violations of the Voting Rights Act, Equal Protection and Due Process, and Ohio’s
right to vote. Morever, it would appear that Secretary Blackwell’s apparent failure to followup
on these machine errors by way of an investigation would violate his duty to investigate
election law irregularities.

The role of voting machines and computers in our election represents an increasingly
serious issue in our democracy. Our concerns are exacerbated by the fact that there are very few
companies who manufacture and operate voting machines, and they tend to be controlled by
executives who donate largely, if not exclusively, to the Republican Party and Republican
candidates. Issues such as the need for verifiable paper trails and greater accountability all
warrant further investigation and possibly legislation.

254. Many elected officials and candidates complained in 2004.

Read the information on the Congressional committee that came to Ohio, took vast amounts of testimony and data from citizens and statisticions,and wrote a book length report on the theft. Several suits were filed. The Green and Libertarian candidates filed for and obtained a statewide recount, which many DUers worked on and contributed to. The recount was foiled when Triad, the very slimy programming firm used by the SOS (Blackwell) reprogrammed every tabulator in the state in the weeks before the recount. Much of the investigative work and organizing was done right here on DU.

349. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence...

...and the fact what whatever evidence you think exists hasn't convinced anyone with astake in Ohio politics (including people I know personally), leads me to stick with the belief that the Republicans keep trying to steal elections the old-fashioned way BECAUSE THEY CAN'T steal them electronically.

109. Not that I know of but it would certainly be interesting. n/t

100. I think it is sombody trying to start soemthing.

annonymous never said that they would hack the machines to prevent Rove from flipping the votes. What they said was that they would be watching, collecting evidence and turning it over to the proper authorities.

127. "Looks legit"....really?

Give me a fucking break. ANYONE could have come up with such a fairytale. How can Wonkette raise the question of proof over Anonymous planting malicious code without seeking proof that the actually did anything at all? "Seems legit" just doesn't cut it.

289. It's Wonkette!

140. OOOOOO! I believe it.

Read this to my Husband who is a VERY talented techie and he said its quite possible. Coincidently Two or three days before the election The company My Husband works for On the Base had a one day class on computers and one of the things they showed the class was how easy it was to hack the voting machines 6 minutes flat and ANYONE can do it.

219. awwwww

155. Why is everyone focusing on ORCA?

The Wonkette article wonders if ORCA was a vote-stealing operation rather than or in addition to being a get out the vote app. The communication from someone claiming to represent Anonymous makes no such claim.

ORCA was not for election night, it was for GOTV.

10:00 AM EST - ORCA killer
8:00 PM EST - The Great Oz

The anonymous person is claiming that they installed the firewall at 8:00 PM EST, which would be when totals are starting to show up. The person had no name for this aspect of Rove's "operation", but leaves no doubt that there was another component (other than ORCA) to what Rove was up to.

I read all of the responses to this OP and many here are making the mistake of claiming it could not be true because of what ORCA was. Somehow people are missing the real claim here, not that ORCA was hacked (which in my opinion would be wrong to hack their GOTV effort, not that I know a whole lot about ORCA), but that a second action prevented Rove or other Republican operators from accessing whatever it was that they had in place to alter the vote totals before they were reported. The anonymous person even went as far as to claim the Republican operatives unsuccessfully tried 105 passwords in an attempt to get around "The Great Oz". Clearly it's not ORCA the person is talking about, it's something else which has no name, or none that we know.

I have no idea if what the person claims is true, but the claims of many of the detractors here seem off-base to me.

Thanks for the article, Wonkette, and to the OP, I hadn't heard of this.

I like that this is getting out there, true or not. It will hopefully scare the powers that be into thinking that having a hackable electoral system is not such a good idea. I hope it gets some intense scrutiny.

160. The fact that this latest 'announcement' can't be easily understood points to it being bullshit.

185. I don't see it that way

The confusion is really from Wonkette's muses on what it means (which were fine, but people went off on the wrong track with them), more than the announcement itself. The announcement is vague and unclear, maybe childish, all of which prove nothing about its authenticity.

189. I think we won the election because...we won the election.

And my belief is not based on wishful thinking. Absent evidence to the contrary, that is what happened. If some super-heroic cyber agency rescued us, then they need to publish the code that they hacked.

They didn't and the most likely reason for that is that the entire claim is bullshit.

165. Simple explanation to ORCA?

ORCA is a program that places itself into the stream that networks county and state election computers. When ORCA is working it is connected to each county election computer.

At each county computer are read/write pages showing vote totals.
(Read/write means that you can write to that screen and read what was written and rewrite it so that it reads different. On DU you are working with a read/write program. Simply, it is called editable.)

So as the numbers are entered at county level, ORCA reads the numbers and changes those numbers at will. The data entry person at the county computer is updating so much that they can't keep track of the changes.

If the count is from a DRE -- Direct Recording Electronic -- there is no data entry person. The numbers are written from one computer to another without any human sight.

OpScans numbers are also transferred electronically from a red/write memory stick.

So, there is ORCA with a human sitting there looking at the numbers coming in and editing those numbers as the person sees fit. Those new numbers are sent over the network to the county computers. Changing those numbers sight unseen. It doesn't even have to be a human, it could be a computer program reading and writing.

What Anon claims to have done is place an administrative password on the ORCA system keeping the person at the ORCA keyboard from logging in (much like you log in to DU) thereby stopping ORCA for accessing the network and rewriting the numbers on the county and state computers.

Te following article from the St. Pete Times details election officials not being able to publish its results until 16 minutes after the polls were closed in one Florida county that prides itself on being the first to upload its data to the web.

236. Do you have a link for that info on ORCA?

I'm trying to learn about this, interesting subject. I've googled and read a few sites, have seen nothing similar to the info in your post though. And frankly I'd be surprised if it's correct, it doesn't sound right to me. Of course I've been surprised before, not saying it's impossible, but would like to see your source if you have one.

267. So you just made stuff up

That's fine, it could be you're correct, better though if you would indicate in your post that it's conjecture instead of making it look like that is real information.

I know about man-in-the-middle attacks, have followed Spoonamore, Fitzrakis, and Bradblog ever since 2004, and I do believe that's what happened in Ohio in 2004. In fact that's why I'm interested in this thread. To this day I still receive the emails from the Case_Ohio action group (CASE_OH@yahoogroups.com), which has been looking into this and related issues ever since 2004.

I don't think that's what ORCA was. In fact, from what I've seen, it's not at all connected to the DRE - tabulator network, and could in no way do what you're claiming. I'm open to evidence to the contrary, if you have any.

I think it's more likely that ORCA was GOTV, and if they had a man-in-the-middle attack set up, it was what Anonymous is claiming to have quarantined at 8:00 PM EST.

291. Well, Anon calls it ORCA

You don't like it go argue with them.

Of course I don't have the fucking proof. If I did, they'd all be in jail. What I did was lay out the common sense parameters for how the votes could be manipulated. Sorry if it isn't something you can take to the AG.

180. Here is the original source Wonkette got her info from (Much, much more at link within):

Last month, we offered a million dollar reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of anyone who rigged a federal election on November 6th. We urged computer experts to contact us with information about any election manipulation of the tabulation results.

On November 12th, we received a letter from “The Protectors,” apparently a group of white hat cyber sleuths, mentioning our reward and stating that two months ago, they began monitoring the “digital traffic of one Karl Rove, a disrespecter of the Rule of Law, knowing that he claimed to be Kingmaker while grifting vast wealth from barons who gladly handed him gold to anoint another King while looking the other way.”

“The Protectors” said that they had identified the digital structure of Rove’s operation and of ORCA, a Republican get out the vote software application. After finding open “doors” in the systems, they created a “password protected firewall” called “The Great Oz,” and installed it on servers that Rove planned to use on election night to re-route and change election results “from three states.”

The letter indicated that “ORCA Killer” was launched at 10am EST and “The Great Oz” at 8pm EST on November 6th. “The Protectors” watched as ORCA crashed and failed throughout Election Day. They watched as Rove’s computer techs tried 105 times to penetrate “The Great Oz” using different means and passwords.

238. Thanks

that was interesting.

The link worked for me a couple of hours ago, but not now. Luckily I saved the page. I don't think Occupy will mind, so here's the page. If it is a problem for all this to be posted, someone let me know and I'll delete it, or a mod can just do it themself.

Karl Rove Loses Election After Being Checkmated By Cyber Sleuths?

By CL - Posted on 15 November 2012

Last month, we offered a million dollar reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of anyone who rigged a federal election on November 6th. We urged computer experts to contact us with information about any election manipulation of the tabulation results.

We Received A Letter

On November 12th, we received a letter from “The Protectors,” apparently a group of white hat cyber sleuths, mentioning our reward and stating that two months ago, they began monitoring the “digital traffic of one Karl Rove, a disrespecter of the Rule of Law, knowing that he claimed to be Kingmaker while grifting vast wealth from barons who gladly handed him gold to anoint another King while looking the other way.”

“The Protectors” said that they had identified the digital structure of Rove’s operation and of ORCA, a Republican get out the vote software application. After finding open “doors” in the systems, they created a “password protected firewall” called “The Great Oz,” and installed it on servers that Rove planned to use on election night to re-route and change election results “from three states.”

The letter indicated that “ORCA Killer” was launched at 10am EST and “The Great Oz” at 8pm EST on November 6th. “The Protectors” watched as ORCA crashed and failed throughout Election Day. They watched as Rove’s computer techs tried 105 times to penetrate “The Great Oz” using different means and passwords.

Finally, they issued the following warning to Mr. Rove: don’t do it again or they would turn over the evidence to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

We are not in a position to vouch for the contents of this letter anymore than we can vouch for the video by Anonymous warning Karl Rove not to rig the election. However, we can analyze that content under the prism of Mr. Rove’s history and facts over the past few weeks. We do so in the hope that this will lead to an investigation of Mr. Rove’s entire operation ala General David Petraeus. In that spirit, we provided this information to the FBI prior to publication, and followed up after publication. For years, we have campaigned for a complete investigation of Mr. Rove. And we have provided extensive legal memos and evidence to the FBI to support such an investigation.

We urge others who have information to about election tampering or other criminal violations by Mr. Rove, including violations of campaign finance laws, to provide that evidence to the FBI. We also urge people who gave money to Mr. Rove and his organizations to contact the FBI if they were misled, promised things that did not happen, or were otherwise defrauded.

Rove’s Background And Election Night Meltdown

Karl Rove has a history of rigging elections going back several decades, including in 2004 when he orchestrated a man-in-the-middle attack to change the votes from Ohio.

In 2012, Mr. Rove’s SuperPacs raised and spent hundreds of millions on behalf of GOP candidates. He courted billionaires and promised them that his candidates would win.

Days before the 2012 election, Mr. Rove predicted a strong Romney win. His spinners lionized him in articles that portrayed him as invincible.

On election night, Mr. Rove worked the three states that held the key to the election – Ohio, Florida and Virginia. But when he tried to access the Ohio election website, he kept getting error messages.

Finally, immediately after Ohio was called for President Obama around 11:30 EST, Mr. Rove appeared on FOX News to dispute the call, saying the election there is far from settled and the call was “premature.”

Fox News’s Chris Wallace said the Romney campaign does "not believe Ohio is in the Obama camp,” noting that he got an email from a top Romney aide who said the campaign disagrees with the network’s call. He then asked Rove if he believed Ohio has been settled.

“No, I don’t,” Rove said.

“I think this is premature,” he added. “We’ve got a quarter of the vote. Now remember, here is the thing about Ohio. A third of the vote or more is cast early and is won overwhelmingly by the Democrats. It’s counted first and then you count the election day and the question is, by the time you finish counting the election day does it overcome that early advantage that Democrats have built up in early voting, particularly in Cuyahoga County.”

Rove said the network needs to be “careful about calling things when we have like 991 votes separating the two candidates and a quarter of the vote yet to count. Even if they have made it on the basis of select precincts, I’d be very cautious about intruding in this process.

The Failure Of ORCA On Election Day

The Rove/Romney coalition created Project Orca, which was supposed to enable poll watchers to record voter names on their smart phones, by listening for names as voters checked in. This would give the campaign real-time turnout data, so they could redirect GOTV resources throughout the day where it was most needed. They recruited 37,000 swing state volunteers for this.

According to various sources, however, ORCA totally failed on Election Day: PIN numbers and passwords did not work, reset tools failed, customer support was ineffective and unavailable, Comcast shut down access for fear of a DDOS attack, and the system crashed and had trouble re-booting. “At one point during Election Day, the system had malfunctioned so badly that desperate volunteers wondered if the program had been hacked.”

Anonymous Warned Rove Prior To The Election

Two weeks prior to the November 6th election, the hactivist group Anonymous posted a video warning Karl Rove not to rig the election.

They told Mr. Rove that he was being watched and that if he attempted to rig the election, he would be stopped. That video went viral in just days.

The Letter From “The Protectors”

The letter we received just days after the election ties together all the information set forth above about the digital difficulties faced by Karl Rove and the GOP on November 6th.

· Karl Rove’s digital architecture surrounding the election was identified and compromised by cyber sleuths in a way that denied him the ability to manipulate election results;

· Project Orca was not secure and had numerous flaws that were exploited to ensure failure;

· Karl Rove was focused on three states—Ohio, Virginia and Florida;

· “Orca Killer” was launched early in the day resulting in failures starting in the morning;

· “The Great Oz” was launched at 8pm, just as polls closed on the East Coast;

· The Ohio Secretary of State results were inaccessible to Mr. Rove after 8pm;

· Mr. Rove disputed the call for Ohio, and told FOX News that it was “premature” as he kept trying to access the results;

· Mr. Rove, Mitt Romney, the GOP, its billionaires, and its talking heads were all “convinced” up to the last minute that Mr. Romney would win, some even saying “by a landslide;”

· Prior to the election, Anonymous warned Mr. Rove that it had identified his digital structure and was watching for any manipulations;

· Mr. Romney and the GOP leadership were “shell shocked” when President Obama won the election.

The Upshot Of All This

Apparently, “The Protectors” were able to completely thwart Karl Rove’s attempts to manipulate this election by employing a firewall to stop man-in-the-middle tabulation attacks and improper transfers of tabulation data. Moreover, apparently, they were able to pinpoint and exploit flaws and structural weaknesses in Project Orca that caused a cascading of problems and subsequent catastrophic failure. Apparently, there was some connection between Mr. Rove and Project Orca, and they were probably both plugged into the same voter database.

Lessons Learned And Our Position

At VR, we have spent the past decade exposing flaws in the election process, especially the use of electronic voting, secret software and cyber attacks on tabulation systems. Princeton computer scientists, Argonne Laboratories experts, GOP insiders and even the CIA have shown that electronic election manipulation is both possible and occurring.

Based on our experience and the supporting evidence, we take the letter from “The Protectors” at face value. Karl Rove had the means, motive, experience and opportunity to do whatever it took to win the election for his clients. If he, in fact, intended to use improper and illegal means to digitally manipulate the election, and white hat cyber sleuths who stopped it discovered that, then that is a good thing. We hope that those cyber sleuths will provide that evidence to the FBI, post it publicly or send it to us to do so.

One thing that is not clear from the letter is the relationship between the cyber manipulation and Project Orca. Were they both part of Karl Rove’s scheme? Were they using the overlapping servers or databases? Did “The Great Oz” automatically cause problems for Project Orca? Did Mr. Rove plan to use the data from “Project Orca” to help the cyber manipulation scheme succeed? We would like to know the answers to these questions so we can more fully understand the legal and moral implications of “Orca Killer.”

As far as lessons learned, we are hopeful that those who have been skeptical and opposed to greater security in elections will now get on board in a bipartisan manner to, as President Obama said, “fix” the broken election system. We are hopeful that billionaires, SuperPacs and politicians will see, as governments in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere have seen, that a few dedicated cyber sleuths can protect democracy from corrupt power brokers by thwarting electoral crimes. We are hopeful that everyone will see Karl Rove for what he is – a scammer who can’t win without cheating and manipulating election results.

359. So they are claiming they committed two federal felonies

Hacking ORCA alone should land them in prison as ORCA was a legitimate GOTV application.

Unfortunately for theeir story, ORCA failed on it's own without any outside intervention. It was never stress tested and could not stand up to the legitimate load on election day. They are liars, not felons.

196. Two reasons to disbelieve the claim:

1) If Anonymous did hack into ORCA then they would have claimed it sooner.

2) If Anonymous had evidence that ORCA was a steal-the-vote system, they would have produced it before the election or immediately after. To do so would have earned them very high marks all over the world.

This smacks of somebody inventing some fun stories well after the fact, despite it supposedly being dated 8 November (or back-dated). Why are we only hearing about it now?

Simple Romney incompetence is a much more believable explanation for ORCA's failure. The facts are in evidence that ORCA was never properly tested before rollout on election day.

206. Anonymous issued this video to Rove on 10/22:

In response to your points:

1) They announced they were watching and would intervene:

2) The group explains their decision in the letter they sent to Occupy for Accountability on 11/12; They state Rove's ORCA had 2 doors open, and they could chose one of two paths - leave one door open and catch Rove stealing votes in progress, or protect the vote. They chose to, in their words, protect the citizenry. If Anonymous wanted praise or rewards, there was a one million dollar prize for the taking... they passed on the money.

Anonymous entered this fray some two weeks before the election - you are just just hearing about it now, but others heard weeks before the election.

Read this link, and this one and this link too. There is a great hour by hour, minute by minute play-by-play of the days events on links within these links, if you are interested.

As for me... I am unsure what to believe, but I do not doubt the abilities of Anonymous, and I don't think anyone should, most especially given their past actions and relationship with Wiki.

199. Bullshit. Orca was piece of shit mobile app that didn't scale

Go read the Ars Technica article explaining why it failed. It had nothing to do with Anonymous or Al Gore. Romney's campaign basically tried to run a GOTV operation on the the cheap. Read the corresponding article on Obama's operation if you need nerdgasm fix.

Orca was a GOP operation. Rove had nothing to do with it. Anonymous, or whoever posted this to pastebin, is full of shit.

205. I could see it

And hear me out here.
I'm not one for big conspiracy theories, but I voted in Ohio at around 8 am. I posted on my twitter and FB that something was fishy as hell with the voting machine I used, complete with a picture showing what i was talking about.
I never vote straight-ticket, and I noticed right away that it would give me the "beep" saying a candidate was selected without actually selecting the candidate when I picked a non-GOP candidate. At first I thought it was just a POS machine, but when I picked a GOP candidate in a couple of local races THOSE went through just fine. So I tried to change my vote see what happened: suddenly it wouldn't keep my selection. Not a problem when I switched it back. I literally had to hit the screen 3-4 times for each democratic candidate I tried to pick. Huh, thought I, I guess I watch what it prints. EXCEPT THE BALLOT NEVER PRINTED!! The poor old guy at my election site just dismissed it as "the machines are what they are" and said i had no recourse. I reported to the local authorities who just dismissed it as an "isolated machine malfunction"
I have a photo of the blank piece of paper where mine should have been, showing the last printed ballot. All GOP, and NOT mine.

288. Welcome to DU notafool

Thanks for sharing your experience. There is so much wrong with the use of these systems and you'd think after this many elections showing faults and complications we'd begin to demand a better system.

215. There's more information and links at Neal Rauhauser's blog

Rauhauser is someone with links to both Velvet Revolution and Anonymous. He's also know as the perpetrator of some epic online trolls -- and I wouldn't be at all surprised if this latest incident amounted to nothing more than the Anons jerking Karl Rove's chain.

There he wrote, "I hear things. Things I pass along, things I choose to sit on … and some things cause me to drop hints. They will not say what it is, but they say to watch what happens on the east coast after the polls close. That nebulous, all seeing ‘they‘ …"

I have no idea what he meant -- and as I said, he's something of a joker. But there's something deeper going on here than just Anonymous trying to puff itself up.

230. Watch TurdB.'s head blow up on Fox News..pretty much proves this.

331. I believe it certainly adds credence to the claim,

as does Romney not having prepared a concession speech, but doesn't prove it. Of course the preponderance of evidence I have seen so far in this thread seems to back the claims by Anon more than those simply here to call BS and squelch it sans proof beyond because they say so.

237. Thanks for posting this.

240. ORCA was a means to justify their gains.

A GOTV program, designed to reach out to those R's who registered but not yet voted. If I was to use this for any purpose of election hackIng, I would point to its magnificent success after I knew the election was successfully hacked and won. Many would point fingers, the exit polls showed a narrow Obama victory. What went wrong? All I would have to do is rollout my fancy GOTV program and show to the world, the bogus yet massively fake numbers of R's I got out to vote with ORCA. If I wanted to stop this fraud cold, the first think I would do is damage that GOTV apparatus so that any hacking done, could not be rebuffed by my Rigged tallied GOTV database. KillIng ORCA would be my first priority. It would leave the thieves blind, not knowing how much to skew fake gop voter turnout numbers. Second, I would put in place my own set of bogus tabulated precinct totals (something very hard to do, would require folks on the inside and access to the equipment, software and code) if I was able to achieve this, then and only then could Insert my modified (for Obama) totals ahead of Roves set of totals.

That being said, this letter and video, all likely BS tin foil hat stuff. But if I were to do it, I can see how these Anonymi claims theoretically could work. Some of the pollIng data my suggest such an attempt was thwarted. Ohio for example, Obama should have come out ahead at least three points (pre provisional ballots) not by 1.9 PTs. This to me, suggests Rove may have had some success until the SOS site went down, and something could have been changed against his favor. Or he and Husted scrambled to undo the Anonymi hack but realized they could not simply because Anonymi or who ever Also could have purposefully held back the ciahoga numbers to better refect the real rusults . Same goes for VA and Fl's heavy dem counties. They reported last and pushed Obama over the top.

Mitt Romney lost the Presidential election November 6 – winning only 38.3% of the 538 electoral votes. But Romney, a famously data-driven decider, has completely missed the boat when it comes to explaining his loss.

It was not what Romney called ”Obama’s gifts” that won him the election, it was a self-inflicted wound — the failure of Romney’s online voter turnout system — ORCA — that vaporized Romney’s power dreams...(snip)

(snip)...ORCA was the killer whale that beached itself on election day. According to the Boston Globe, Romney’s campaign thought ORCA was an ”unrivaled high-tech means of communicating with more than 30,000 field workers who were stationed at polling places on Election Day.”

ORCA did not work as planned. If turnout in key precincts was lower than expected, ORCA was supposed to notify Romney’s Boston headquarters. Instead, ORCA got beached due to two problems that could have been fixed if Romney’s team had tested ORCA robustly before election day:

* Higher-than-expected traffic on the system crashed it on election day. Romney had 800 workers at Boston’s TD Garden who were using phones and computers to coordinate with field workers focused on turnout. But “the surge in traffic was so great that [ORCA] didn’t work for 90 minutes, causing panic as staffers frantically tried to restore service,” reported the Globe.

* Volunteers could not access the system. A combination of Personal Identification Number (PIN) and access certification blunders made it impossible for workers to access the system. The Globe noted that “some campaign workers reported that they had incorrect PINs and had not been informed that they needed certification to work at polling places....”

248. Some thoughts, a few guesses, and a conclusion.

OK, there are some interesting thoughts in this thread. I posted upthread that it was possible Anonymous blocked the attempted vote-stealing in Ohio. I still think its technically possible, but probably unlikely. Here's my reasons:

Part one of Anonymous' claim is they interfered with ORCA. Here is a conservative blogger's tale:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10021835729First, he says this was a Team Romney plan, not GOP, not Rove/Crossroads. Claims were made it was the latest, greatest, hi-tech GOTV tool, blah, blah, blah. Supposed training sessions were merely rah-rah pep talks, no training. Information/instruction packets were emailed as pdf files the night before.
OK, this just smacks of a last-minute, done on the cheap, operation. It wasn't available for training, in fact wasn't available until the night before. It wasn't tested. "latest and greatest" type of language isn't an experienced developer would use, its words a young inexperienced person hyping his product uses. Experienced guy just delivers, lets the performance speak for itself. Romney campaign was experiencing money problems the last month and a half, so this was likely done on the cheap. So, in order to hack ORCA, Anonymous had to know about the existence of a program developed at the last minute. They had to know where to find the server. And, once hacking into the server and program, surely they would have realized it was doomed to failure...no hacking necessary.

Addressing Anonymous' second claim, that of unhacking the vote tabulation hack. They said they could prove the tabulation was hacked, or they could unhack it and protect the votes. They claimed to do the latter... easy, since no proof required. Why not do both? Catching (with proof) a major election fraud, and fixing it?...they'd be freakin' heros....not to mention quite wealthy with the business gained from that fame.

So, what happened? I think a fix was in. Polls were spreading the meme that the race was close. Some states (Fl and PA) were targeted for voter suppression. I think Ohio was targeted for voter suppression and vote-fixing. The plan back-fired. The voter-suppression efforts made people even more determined to vote. Husted was under close scrutiny... there were poll-watchers, attorneys, a Federal Judge, and probably a few tech guys behind the scenes. Husted realized voter turnout was huge. Ohio was no longer critical (Obama could lose Ohio and Florida and still win). I think Husted realized it was hopeless, he was likely to get caught, and got cold feet on the vote-fix. But he didn't tell Karl...

303. Some thoughts on your thoughts

There has been a kind of underground online war being carried on since 2010 between the right and left, mostly on Twitter and in blogs, much of it anonymously or by way of sock puppets.

Some of the participants on the left are associated with Anonymous. Many of those on the right are tied in with the late Andrew Breitbart's online empire. (The failed film "Occupy Unmasked," which was a Breitbart-related attempt to claim that Occupy was all an Anonymous plot, was perhaps the most public manifestation of this war.)

Velvet Revolution -- the organization which made the offer of a reward to which the Anonymous letter in the OP responds -- got dragged into the battle willy-nilly at some point last year and woven into right-wing conspiracy theories involving George Soros and Barbara Streisand.

There are at least loose connections between the people on the right and the Romney campaign, which indicated at one point that it didn't trust the mainstream media and preferred to get its message out through avenues like the Breitbart sites.

The Ace of Spades blog which you cite and Erick Erickson of redstate.org are both part of this right-wing blogger network. When they jumped in right after the election to blame the Romney meltdown on untested software and excessive reliance on consultants, it seemed like an uncharacteristic but refreshing dose of honesty and self-criticism. But now I'm thinking that if the Anonymous claims are true, it could have instead been a preemptive attempt to lay down a counter-story that would undercut those claims.

That's a big "if" -- but I think it should be factored into your calculations of what seems probable. At the very least, take into account that Ace of Spades is not an unbiased source and may be playing its own games.

320. What you say is possible.

I did acknowledge that A's claim is technically feasable. And it could be that RW stayed quiet bc exposing A would expose their own hacks. But that is speculation.

What we do know is that Romney Campaign was caught flat-footed by Dem turnout. There was the "enthusiasm gap", there was the barrage of negative ads, there was the voter-suppression efforts. They thought Dems would not turn out in numbers for Obama as in '08. They didn't think Hispanics would break so heavily for Obama, and didn't think the gender gap would be anything to worry about. I myself had doubts about the youth vote, though based solely on handful of youths I know personally. As a personal anecdote, inre the gender gap, back in mid-summer I posted on FB an article about the Repuke's War on Women, along with some scarey poll numbers for the GOP. That post generated quite a few "likes", and comments of outrage from women friends of mine. One friend, a moderate republican, didn't comment but shared the post on the wall of a good friend of hers (and acquaintence of mine) who was working on the Romney Campaign in Miami, and asked him if it was going to be a problem. His assurance to her was it would blow over, and wouldn't be a problem Nov 6th. LOL, we saw how that worked, GOP candidates couldn't keep their mouths shut, and the issue stayed alive all election.

As for the R turnout, obviously Romney Campaign over-estimted it. They thought their hi-tech, but untested, ORCA program was a game-changer. Whether it was Anon interference or R incompetence, it failed miserably. I think R&R got fewer votes than Gramps & Bimbo did in '08.

Anyway, as it turned out Ohio wasn't critical. Neither was Florida. Obama could have lost both, and still won. He only needed to win the 4 smallest swing states to beat Romney. The math was simply in his favor.

257. I'm sure they'd want to take credit for it

but I think I'd ascribe ORCA's failure to good ole' fashioned incompetence. The Business Insider article made it clear that it was simply not ready for prime time. Hell, there were problems at the TD Garden as well.

It was a mess all the way through. I don't think Anonymous was needed in this case. I actually think this claim is sort of pathetic. It's like claiming divine intervention, when in reality none was needed. The much simpler explanation is that ORCA was a failure due to republican arrogance and hubris - Romney's in particular. It's also more fitting, I believe. But I suppose this kind of garbage keeps the tin foilers on all sides of the political spectrum occupied.

272. If Anonymous really did hack the ahcking (and I don't believe they did)

They would have been much better served to take the original hack to the extreme, either by giving Romney more than 100% of the votes, or giving 100% to a fictional candidate, or even a third party candidate. Everyone in the precinct who then voted otherwise would say, "but hey, I voted for X, why does it say that no one in my precinct voted for X," and election fraud would have to be investigated thoroughly.

Anything that preserves the status quo with regards to American voting is a waste of time, while anything that exposes the weaknesses and gets the average Joe to realize computers involved in elections is bad is a good thing.

That 257,133-vote swing almost wipes out Mr. Obama's 2008 Ohio victory margin of 262,224. Since most observers expect Republicans to win Election Day turnout, these early vote numbers point toward a Romney victory in Ohio. They are also evidence that Scott Jennings, my former White House colleague and now Romney Ohio campaign director, was accurate when he told me that the Buckeye GOP effort is larger than the massive Bush 2004 get-out-the-vote operation.

Democrats explain away those numbers by saying that they are turning out new young Ohio voters. But I asked Kelly Nallen, the American Crossroads data maven, about this. She points out that there are 12,612 GOP "millennials" (voters aged 18-29) who've voted early compared with 9,501 Democratic millennials.

Are Democrats bringing out episodic voters who might not otherwise turn out? Not according to Ms. Nallen. She says that about 90% of each party's early voters so far had also voted in three of the past four Ohio elections. Democrats also suggest they are bringing Obama-leaning independents to polls. But since Mr. Romney has led among independents in nine of the 13 Ohio polls conducted since the first debate, the the likelihood is that the GOP is doing as